Our sun, the ‘center of our world’, buzzes with activities all the time. Experts manage as best as they can to get a glimpse of the solar events and happenings: that was how they were successful at capturing images of solar filaments and flares, showing us once again the amazing beauty of our sun.

The sun, our lamp in the heavens that makes our world shine bright, has revealed solar filaments, as reported by the NASA. The images of an enormous extended filament made up of solar material have been captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) on the 30th of September.

What are the solar filaments?

According to the definition given by the experts of the NASA, filaments are “are clouds of solar material suspended above the sun by powerful magnetic forces. Though notoriously unstable, filaments can last for days or even weeks”.

The images were caught in extreme ultraviolet light, in different wavelengths, by the SDO, the body assigned with the duty of watching the sun every single day throughout.

The filament was seen rotating around the sun for a number of days. It is of an imposing size, the length of which is around 100 times the size of our own planet.

Solar flares

The SDO also spotted a mid-level solar flare last week, on the 2nd of October. Solar flares are the products of radiation; NASA explained that “solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation”. They cannot affect us as they cannot go beyond our atmosphere which constitutes a protective shield for us. However, if the flares are intense enough, they might interfere with the layer of the atmosphere where communication signals are made to travel.